


Wish Upon a Walking Star

by Goonlalagoon



Series: Just a bunch of kids with badges [7]
Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: F/M, Miz Eliza and deserts and people who ask questions and always care about the answer, also people who have narrow views and are hidebound academics, though she mostly ignores those people in favour of interesting ruins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 08:05:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12294912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: Somehow she always forgot how much brighter and closer the stars were out in the desert, whenever she travelled elsewhere. When dusk fell and the moon rose, looking close enough to walk right up to, her heart gave a warm little twist of homecoming - home wasn’t a place, it was something she carried in herself, wherever she planted her feet, but these shifting sands were the steadiest place she knew.The engine in her battered truck had broken down yet again, but Miz Eliza considered that a problem for later. For now she sat on the cooling roof and mapped stories into the lights and spaces in the sky.





	Wish Upon a Walking Star

**Author's Note:**

> For thats-the-moon-grey on Tumblr, who answered my request for prompts back in June with ‘anything with Miz Eliza’. Took a while but we got there.

Somehow she always forgot how much brighter and closer the stars were out in the desert, whenever she travelled elsewhere. When dusk fell and the moon rose, looking close enough to walk right up to, her heart gave a warm little twist of homecoming - home wasn’t a place, it was something she carried in herself, wherever she planted her feet, but these shifting sands were the steadiest place she knew.

The engine in her battered truck had broken down yet again, but Miz Eliza considered that a problem for later. For now she sat on the cooling roof and mapped stories into the lights and spaces in the sky.

Her brother had taken her hand at the end of her visit, in his stern, smart office at the Academy, Rupert waiting patiently outside to throw his chubby toddler arms around her legs and say goodbye, and asked her once again to stay. He had offered to find her a place as an instructor in their sages’ programme, if she wanted, but she was always welcome in his home.

“There’s a library, and a whole suite of rooms I barely use. Please, Eliza, think about it? I…” _worry about you,_ finished the furrow in his brow. Her brother had always been a solemn worrier, set shoulders asking for responsibility, heart yearning for stability.

Eliza didn’t want stability, and her brother could never understand that - that she didn’t keep home outside of herself as an anchor, a destination, a beacon. She wanted chaos, but not as he saw it. She wanted exploration and discovery, broken down engines and wrong turnings that lead to deep pools or tiny villages.

Eliza wanted only the stability she already had; her brother’s love, her son’s love, the stars scattered above her, her own steady heart and nimble hands.

* * *

 

The first time she went to the desert, she was nineteen, rattling along in the passenger seat of a different battered truck. Her supervisor was driving, making occasional stilted conversation. The selection for the placement had been down to an essay competition, and it hadn’t taken long to realise it was for the best the essays had been anonymous for assessment. He seemed to think that because she was a woman she would have delicate sensibilities.

She’d grown up in Rivertown, exploring and observing those harsh streets. She’d begged, bribed and simply asked her brother to take her out on camping trips and hikes. Before she’d left St John’s Port for this trip, he had taken her out to a field and set up targets, and taught her how to fire a gun.

“So that when you inevitably forget to pack rations you have a chance of getting something to eat,” he’d said with a despairing head shake and a fond smile, as he showed her how to skin it ready for cooking. She didn’t tell her supervisor any of this, just watched the world outside the window with wide, sharp eyes.

It was late evening when they broke down on a desert track, hours from the university they were basing themselves at. Her supervisor grumbled and dug blankets out of the truck and looked around for something to make a fire with so he could have a cup of tea. They would have to wait until the next day and hope the next traveller along this road knew how to fix their problem. Eliza ignored him and climbed up onto the roof of the van to get a better look.

In sunlight everything had been gold, but the sun dropped below the horizon like a light flicking off, and the world was painted in silver. The stars were bright, ethereal but seeming close enough to touch, and she lay on the roof to try to map them out. Her heart was beating in her chest and it felt three sizes larger than normal. She thought her brother had probably felt something like this when he walked through the Academy doors.

Eliza fell asleep on the roof of the van and woke cold, but it had been worth it. Before the sun had had time to turn everything baking hot a truck rattled down the road, pulling in to an obliging halt when they waved frantically. Eliza peered curiously over the shoulder of the desert dark woman who climbed out of the driver’s seat, waving at her kids to stay put, and watched closely while her supervisor fretted about the time off to the side.

The woman’s hands were nimble, calloused and certain, oil settling into the grooves of her hands the way ink was always rubbed into Eliza’s. She barely seemed to be thinking, the innards of the truck as familiar as breathing, and Eliza’s fingers itched to take notes. They set off in convoy, the children appearing in the window every so often to wave back at them until they took different turn offs.  
When they reached the university, Eliza made for the library after putting her bags down but before unpacking. She threw an eager glance at the shelves of anthropology and desert culture, but wandered until she found a few shelves on engineering. Most of the books were too complex to be useful, but she found a promisingly battered and oil marked volume tucked away in a corner.

They had two weeks of comfort, her supervisor said half sternly, half mournfully, warning her to make the most of it while she could. Eliza spent quite a lot of that time wandering the streets and markets, getting sun-burnt and picking up street slang in half a dozen dialects. She hunted systematically through the library’s section on desert cultures and slipped into lectures, asking questions with sharp, confident zeal. One lecturer made the mistake of blustering at the presence of a woman in his lecture hall, and she peered at him curiously until he trailed off in embarrassed bemusement at her lack of response. She sniffed scornfully, and kept going to his lectures, because even if he had misguided ideas about the right to learn, he had some interesting stories about the ancient desert cities that had been largely lost to the dunes.

“This isn’t the kind of internship where you fetch coffee and file papers.” her supervisor had said, peering at her doubtfully, at their first planning meeting. “You’ll be doing as much work as any other member of the team.” She’d smiled and nodded, teeth a little gritted.  
“That was what I was planning to do, sir. I want hands on experience, and enough material for a paper at the end of my dissertation - ideally enough material to form the basis for more, of course, but definitely at least one.” He’d harrumphed, and she had lifted her chin with a hint of defiance. Her opinion of the man hadn’t improved since then, but she was socially aware enough after years of her parents’ dinner parties to know she would need his grudging respect in the future and tearing him to shreds right then wouldn’t do her much good.

It was a good thing she wasn’t supposed to be fetching the coffees, because her memory for who liked cream and who had sugar was terrible, and her habit of getting sidetracked by a debate or interesting conversation meant that it would turn up cold anyway. Her filing was pretty all over the place too, but she rarely needed to double check important facts in any case. The things she cared about stayed in her head just fine.

The van rattled back out of the university after their two weeks, laden with supplies and having gained two more researchers - a PhD student and a technician - who were pleasant enough company, even if they too seemed to be mourning their departure from the city. Eliza watched the desert roll by, and wondered why on earth they missed it when this was where they were going? She was shaken from her thoughts when the engine coughed, spluttered, and died.

While the others peered at a map and grumbled, Eliza propped the bonnet open and tried to match the machinery inside to her memory of the illustrations in the oil marked volume she had read through. A toolkit settled onto the road by her with a clank, and the technician smiled at her.  
“Done this before?” Eliza shook her head, and gestured at the engine.  
“It broke down on the way into the university. There was a woman who knew how to fix it, I think she just tightened that bit there…”

“Yeah, I see, hey, grab the wrench outta the box for me?” He chattered while he worked, grousing about poor funding and how often they had to fix up the vehicles they were able to use. He cleaned the wrench off with a rag and gave her another cheerful smile. “Should still arrive with some daylight. Remind me when we get there and I’ll show you the basic tune ups to check for, yeah? Anyone working out here should know how to fix their own truck.” She flicked her eyebrows up and sideways, where her supervisor was complaining at the dutifully listening PhD student. The tech picked up the toolbox and grinned. “Hey, I said _should_.”

When she went to bed that evening, and the next, there was oil ground into her fingertips, staining the edges of her nails, but her mind was spinning over instructions - _check this valve, the level of liquid in this thing, looks like this has a tendency to rattle loose but at least it’s an easy fix…_

The third day of travel brought them to the encampment they would be based in for the time being, sheltered between the walls of a rocky quarry. There were two trucks already there, looking weatherbeaten and with sand piling around the wheels. As they pulled into the makeshift parking lot two of the local guides leapt up out of the shade to help them offload supplies. Eliza peered with interest at their soft, flowing clothes and tried to catch any of the phrases she’d learnt in the city in the rapid tumble of their chatter, without any luck.

She helped Cris, the technician, set up the two tents they’d brought and dragged the food and water inside. When they finally emerged after setting up, dark had fallen. Three weeks into the desert, Eliza still wasn’t quite used to that - between one blink and the next the sky would go inky black and star speckled, the moon hanging just above the horizon, seeming a bare step away from the top of the rock walls. There wasn’t so much a sunset as a changeover, like flicking a switch, and she stood breathless for a moment to soak it up.

Someone - one of the guides, she guessed - had lit a campfire and there was a woman stirring a pot over it. Eliza made a beeline for her. One of the few female professors at the university in St John’s Port had advised her that making friendships with the women of a culture was always a good first step - they tended to have more influence than many would assume, and were usually vital to most of the day-to-day goings on of the camp, so getting on their good side was just good sense. On her third try, Eliza managed to pick the right language to say ‘that smells delicious’ in, and eventually resorted to mime to ask if she could help at all.

Five minutes later she was stirring some kind of stew, and had entirely exhausted her local language skills, but she knew there was a translator out in the field who she hoped would be able to teach her more. Her supervisor emerged from the tent where he’d been going over plans for the next day as the rest of the camp returned, trudging in from the other end of the canyon, waving and calling out their greetings. He scooped up a bowl from the stack and held it out expectantly as he fell into conversation with one of his colleagues. Eliza scooped three ladles of soup into the bowl and took it from him with a smile and a polite thanks, ignoring his dumbfounded expression. The woman who’d done most of the cooking looked like she wanted to laugh, and Eliza winked at her on the way by, settling by the fire to enjoy her food.

The interpreter turned out to be a no-nonsense mountain born woman who introduced herself as Dichren, and could speak seven languages fluently and read confidently in fifteen. Eliza tailed her whenever she got the chance, scribbling down phonetic phrases and asking endless questions about tenses and regional variations. Cris was terrified of the woman, who barely came up to his shoulder, and peered over her notes in the evening and complained about her terrible handwriting. Eliza blinked at him.  
“Well, I didn’t write them for anyone else to read, did I?”

It was Dichren who showed her how to tie her hair up into a soft scarf to keep it off her neck and protect her from the sun (and so she could happily ignore the grimy stiffness of it, after days of it filling with sand with limited water for washing it), and slathered sun block on the back of her neck with an endless litany of scolding for not having packed any for spending two months in the desert.  
Eliza just hummed absently, busy pondering the layout of the ruins they were in the middle of excavating. They were unlikely to find anything groundbreaking, but it was fascinating to see it all laid out before her, not just photos and field notes in someone else’s handwriting.

But it was the second month of her trip she was looking forwards to the most - travelling to another, smaller dig, in the company of one of the nomadic clans. A month of living with them, a chance to study a small cache by day and the nomadic culture in the evenings - their stories, their knowledge, their histories. Her supervisor didn’t seem to look forward to it as much, but Eliza rolled her eyes behind his back while the corners of Dichren’s eyes crinkled up in silent amusement as she nodded soberly and said that yes, camels were deeply unpleasant, and yes, of course, nomadic desert camps were utterly devoid of luxury, and of course it was a good thing for academia that he was so self-sacrificing.

The nomads rode into the canyon camp that evening, and Eliza’s fingers were already itching to take notes. Professor Morton scurried over to a tall, athletic man calling out instructions and greetings, but Eliza’s eye landed on a straight-backed woman, a crown of hair and lifted chin, a baby safely in a sling around her chest, and grinned to herself as she scrambled down the rocks. She wanted to be nearby to see the expression on the professor’s face when he realised the leader of the group was a woman - so much for his repeated lectures on ‘delicate sensibilities’ and ‘desert cultures having strong opinions on women’.

They rode out early the next morning, travelling slower than the nomads usually would to allow for the fact that someone had to lead their camels on foot as neither Eliza or the professor knew enough to direct one themselves. They were borrowing two camels that belonged to Aisling’s nephew, who was leading the pair along. Dichren thrust a full bottle of sun-block into Eliza’s bag, with stern instructions to use it, and looked doubtful when she dutifully agreed. Enough of the nomads spoke both languages that the interpreter wasn’t travelling with them, and Eliza was sorry to see her go. She gripped her friend’s hands, squeezed gently, and told her to stay in touch. Dichren smiled, soft, and said she wouldn’t need to - anyone could see Eliza would be back, and Dichren had no intention of going back to the cold mountains.

Eliza had never seen a camel before, except in photos. She watched it kneel on command, and felt a little sympathy for professor Morton’s complaints. It didn’t so much sit down as collapse in two stages, and from watching the others mount up she wasn’t sure how exactly one stayed put as it got back to its feet in an equally jerky motion. She resigned herself to falling in the sand, and accepted Mo’s hand up to get into the saddle. He fussed around for a moment, securing her bag and checking the blankets that covered the saddle were secure, before flapping the lead rein to make the camel get back up. Eliza yelped as she was thrown forwards and backwards, clinging to the pommel of the saddle hard enough to hurt, and someone laughed. It wasn’t malicious - it was a child, and she grinned in the direction it had come from, even as she heard the distinctive tone of voice that meant someone was being scolded. Professor Morton’s beast heaved itself to its feet, and Eliza just had time to wave before they started off down the canyon.

The camel swayed with every step, and it took some fidgeting to find a way of sitting that wasn’t uncomfortable and avoided kicking Mo in the back every other step. But once she was settled and able to properly look around, she felt her heart skip a beat. They’d been in the desert for a month, but this - this was different. The dunes rose around them, rolling on and on to the horizon, shimmering in the heat, heat haze blurring the line between sand and sky. Partway into the ride Aisling dropped back to plod along next to them, maintaining polite chatter with the professor until she interrupted him in the middle of a sentence to order Eliza to take a drink.“You have to keep drinking, or you’ll make yourself sick. That water skin has to be empty by the time we stop to eat, understand?” Eliza blinked, and took a mouthful of water under the eagle-eyed gaze, and Aisling nodded sharply before dropping back to her polite conversation with the offended professor as though there had been no pause.

They didn’t bother pitching the tents that night, just rolled sleeping mats out. Eliza burrowed happily into her squishy sleeping roll and watched the stars. She was half asleep when one streaked across the sky, falling out of view close to the horizon, and she smiled softly to herself. She didn’t particularly believe in omens, but she decided if she did she would take it as a good one.

She woke with the sun - dawn was as brief as dusk - and wandered in search of breakfast. The cook fires were already going, upturned metal bowls heating over the fires. The men around the fire waved off Eliza’s offer of help, but let her sit and watch as they stretched dough into thin circles and threw it over the dishes to cook into the flat-breads that seemed to be part of every meal. A shadow fell over her before someone tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned to find a child with the most infectious grin she’d ever come across hovering behind her.

“Mom says you and the professor can eat with us.” He loaded a stack of flat breads onto a plate and beckoned her to follow. The professor was already waiting with Aisling and her husband, sitting on patterned rugs and eyeing the tray of food set between them with what he probably thought was well disguised suspicion. Eliza ignored him, and spent most of the meal talking to her guide, who seemed delighted to have someone new to trade stories with. He happily shoved some kind of creamy cheese and fig jam onto her plate, before smearing both over his own flat bread and rolling it up like a pancake, while his mother sighed pointedly at him for talking with his mouth full. Eliza hid a smile. Even when she was scolding him, Aisling clearly doted on her son.

With a little more experience of camels, it took less time to settle into a comfortable position, adjusting to the sway with every step. Eliza shifted the blankets covering her saddle around in an attempt to cushion the harsh peak at the back from bruising her back further, though she wasn’t optimistic it would work and had mostly decided to accept the inevitable bruise.

Liam was perched amidst a pile of his family’s belongings, and cajoled the cousin his reins were looped to into keeping pace with the visitors. Professor Morton dripped syrupy friendliness, and Eliza snorted to herself, catching sight of Liam’s polite but disgruntled expression. She didn’t know much about children, but she remembered that she had hated being talked down to as though being young meant she couldn’t understand.

So when Professor Morton decided he’d humoured a child enough and got out a book, Eliza grinned over at the boy, digging a notebook out of her pocket.  
“I hear that your people are excellent storytellers?”

She forgot to write anything down after the first few sentences, but she remembered every word that lunchtime and scribbled it out. The desert people had a tradition of storytelling - of course they do, she’d thought in the lecture where this had been mentioned as something notable, every culture does, just because we typically write ours down nowadays doesn’t mean it isn’t the same thing - but Liam, young as he was, had the knack for carrying you away with the tale and dropping you breathless back to reality when he was done.

Years and years later, she would read back over the worn pages of her notebook and laugh at the world. Liam had woven a tale of stars and skies for her, and that had been the day the she met the wandering star. Not that she knew that at the time - he was just a man, calm and thoughtful, who breathed the world in with his eyes wide open so as not to miss a precious, fleeting moment of it.

Aisling’s eyebrows had risen when they arrived at the rocky outcrop they’d intended to camp at to find a man peacefully watching them approach. He called out the proper, polite greetings, travel stained and alone, but looking…well, for someone on their own in the desert who didn’t look to have supplies with them, and had an accent that suggested they weren’t desert born - though Eliza couldn’t place where exactly it hailed from either, and readily admitted to herself that she actually meant that his accent just wasn’t like Aisling’s or her peoples’ voices. He was paler than them, too, though still darker than her own Rivertown typical skin.

Suhail watched everything, an infinite curiosity and patience that drew her attention like a lodestone. He looked around for the two days journey with bright interest, and asked about the work of the professor and herself with just as much fascination. The professor blustered, somewhat, thrown by keen interest and no background, and a little insulted that the student’s work was apparently just as interesting as his own. Eliza ignored him and watched the way the camel Suhail had been given permission to ride lipped happily at his sleeve, wondering how he’d befriended the creature. She’d nicknamed her own steed ‘Your Temperamental Majesty’, because the camel certainly lived up to the species’ reputation in terms of temperament and seemed to have a permanent expression of aristocratic disdain.

After the fourth day of travel since leaving the archaeologists’ main camp, they reached an oasis Aisling declared to be within reasonable distance of their small dig. Eliza helped with setting up the camp where she could, but mostly sat with Suhail watching with interest as family groups moved around with organised chaos and familiar precision to pitch tents and build cooking fires.

Somehow Suhail managed to join them on the dig itself; Professor Morton seemed bemused, but Eliza just nodded at him as they rode out in the early morning stillness. It was less than an hours journey, with a rocky scramble to get to the sheltered remains of buildings, weathered and smoothed by the desert winds. So far as she could gather Suhail had no training at all, yet he poured over the layout of buildings with fascination. He passed her a heavy waterskin several times, with smiles and resigned sighs. Eliza found a buried fragment of pottery, and when she (reluctantly) passed it over to be packed away so she could continue searching Suhail handled it like it was spun sugar, like he too could see its value.

In the afternoons they both tagged along in Aisling’s footsteps, observing and questioning when she wasn’t too busy; Liam and the other storyteller’s drew them like moths to the campfire. She filled page after page with scribbled notes just by listening to the answers to his pointed, insightful, and above all genuine questions. _How did they lay out the camp? How much did tent designs vary, between families, between tribes? How long did tools usually last, were they passed down or were they transient? How did the chain of command and authority work, through generations, through the varying group sizes the tribe broke down into depending on resources and family ties? How does this game work..?_

That last was how they both ended up playing a very serious game of something like hopscotch, delighted children giggling at how these clumsy adults didn’t know any of the rules. Eliza nodded and mentally took notes as they were explained, and felt her eyes flick to the solemn, serious expression on Suhail’s face. It wasn’t false, wasn’t a studied mask for humouring the children, intended to be inoffensive and unpatronising.

He had looked the same, keenly interested and deadly serious, when asking Aisling about nomad politics, the old men by the fire about finding their way in the desert, the women resting in the shade about recipes and finding ingredients, as he did asking children how they played. Later, she thought that might have been the moment she decided to fall in love with him, at least a little, because he understood. There was so much to the world, and all you could do was look around at every part of it you came across.

She had her own questions, too, and she thought she could see him taking his own notes in the sharp look in his eyes, the thoughtful distance in his gaze. _Do cloth colours have any meanings? The patterns and embroideries? How do the tribe groupings work, beyond the immediate family tent? Is everyone here related, or can you join a goum because you want to travel the same way or can pool resources? How often do people move between groups? What do you call that cluster of stars, there? What about that one?_

Their dig was only a small one, else it would have justified more people. Once it had been a handful of buildings, an enclave of stillness in the dunes, before the landscape had changed and it had been worn down to bare stubs of walls in the sand. Suhail spent a morning pacing around the site at her instruction, and found the remnants of the well that had sustained the tiny settlement based on the layout of the buildings. Eliza sketched it out carefully on her map, and he smiled like helping her find it had been the greatest privilege he could imagine.

Professor Morton spoke mostly to Aisling, or the men who seemed to be heads of their own tents. He spoke scant words of the desert tongue. Suhail seemed almost fluent - at least, as fluent as he was in Eliza’s own native tongue. Precise, but not necessarily familiar, sentence structures and phrasings that correctly conveyed meaning but not the way you would expect. Eliza wasn’t that fluent, but she could hold a rough, simplistic conversation, which combined with the ability of most of the nomads to speak at least some of her language, thanks to trade, and a joint effort on mime and drawing in the sand meant she felt reasonably happy she was getting answers to the questions she was trying to ask. Professor Morton sniffed when she tried to talk about the weaving the older women had shown her, lounging in the shade in the heat of the day, and she gritted her teeth. She wondered how you could go so many years studying people and cultures, and not realise asking the women about their world was just as important as asking the men.

Professor Morton was happily measuring the rudimentary burial site they had found, and was cataloging (scant) generations and theorising on whether this had been a waypoint or a settled dwelling. Eliza had uncovered what she increasingly thought had been a child’s room, with Suhail helping. When he drifted away, the morning after they started to focus on the room, she was vaguely surprised and then he faded entirely from her awareness once he was no longer handing her tools or carefully excavating at her side. It was only when she stopped squinting at her page as she precisely recorded the pattern on a carved cup that she realised he had set up some kind of awning to keep the sun from beating down on them, burning the back of her neck and glancing off of the page. He settled back by her with a smile, and nudged the water closer to her hand before picking up a soft brush to help clear sand from the raised whorls under her fingertips.

When a group of men went out hunting at the end of the month, they politely invited the professor to go with them, and he said he’d be delighted. Eliza glanced wryly at the slightly waxy expression on his face and then at a couple of kids nearby nudging each other and giggling, and wondered if he knew he was being - very politely - mocked. Or possibly tested. They invited Suhail much more enthusiastically, but he declined. Eliza didn’t bother to volunteer the fact that she could hit a rabbit reliably, though she was tempted to do so sheerly on principle. Once the hunting party had left, Aisling sent Liam to fetch both of them from where they were watching a weaver at work, and invited them to sit with her. Her younger child - Lanetia - was fussing in her sling, and her brother reached out for her without prompting, bearing her away to the shade of their tent and crooning a lilting song. Aisling watched them go, face softer than Eliza could have imagined it, then turned back to her guests.

“So, the professor has gone off to record our men’s barbaric, unrefined hunting - or possibly the mystic way in which we commune with the desert, one can never tell which way one such as he will write these things, and I do not particularly care - but it would be very rude of me to keep you both here in his absence.” She smiled slyly. “We tend not to build things that last, in the desert. The sands shift, and so do we, but sometimes there are patches of stillness. My husband’s nephew is restocking some of our food caches while we are in the area, and has said he would not object to your company. There are some more intact ruins nearby - an old church or temple. I know that you have already packed your equipment ready to leave, but you should see them before you leave; I believe they may be of some interest, if only for the variation.” She folded her hands precisely, and questions burned on Eliza’s tongue - _where did you learn to hold yourself like this? Who taught you to stand so that the world would part politely at your feet? Does it hurt, that the professor thinks there’s some mistake, some bizarre exception, in your authority, or are you really so confident that it slides off you like rain? What does strength like this cost you?_

For once, she didn’t ask, just swallowed her curiosity down. This strength was not something to be questioned lightly, in case it shattered. This strength was not something to be questioned unless you were one of those who had the privilege of being someone Aisling could let herself shatter before. Eliza looked at the still face, the strong hands, the crown of hair, and bit her tongue.

It took two days to reach the supplies cache, carved into rock and hidden unless you knew it was there. Aisling’s husband’s nephew and his friends where polite and friendly enough, but kept themselves to themselves. Eliza looped her camel’s lead rein to Suhail’s saddle - he was better at directing the stubborn, lovely creatures - and stared around as though it was her first day in the desert. Every day felt like she was discovering it all over again, and she kept waiting for it to become mundane, familiar, unnoticed, but every morning she still had to catch her breath.

They didn’t talk much, for that journey, and she appreciated it. The end of the research trip loomed and she wanted to take this warm silence in. It didn’t need to be filled, and she wanted to hold the calm inside herself when she left.

The supplies cache was beyond the ruins, so Suhail and Eliza stopped there while the nomads went on, more interested in checking supplies and storing everything carefully than archaeology, which she supposed was probably reasonable even if she found it utterly incomprehensible. The ruins were worn smooth with years of sand and wind, crumbling arches and a deep well that still held water. With a huff, the camels flopped down in the shade, and Suhail reached for her hand to help her over a missing step. She didn’t let go.

Dark fell while they were still exploring the ruins, the sky lighting up with stars. Peering into the distance Eliza could see a pinprick fire, about where the nomads had said their cache would be, and she shrugged over at Suhail. He shrugged back and dug through their saddlebags for blankets and sleeping bags, and started telling her a story she hadn’t heard about a cluster of stars, her hand still clasped in his.

In the morning, he left. He had to move on, he murmured, seeming half in a daze. He had to keep looking. She didn’t ask him to stay longer, because she’d never expected him to be there in the first place, because she would be leaving soon too, because she’d somehow known this was the last journey they would take together. She held his hand for a moment longer and he smiled, warm and open, eyes fixed on her for a moment like the universe was written out in the lines on her skin. When she left she would carry the stillness of the desert, its uncaring winds and the silence that wrapped around you, but she would also carry the warmth of his hand in hers and the way he listened to every word she said like it was the first time anyone had ever spoken.

She watched him vanish into the haze of sunrise, then reached for a notebook and flipped to a fresh page.

_“Though the nomadic people of the great desert have a rich storytelling tradition, this has rarely been documented outside of the discussion of the importance of story sharing to maintaining cultural identities. Therefore, I collect here…”_


End file.
